Published in 2015
720 pages
28 hours and 38 minutes
Hanya Yanagihara is the author of the The People in the Trees, a book which she says she started writing when she was 21, and which took her nearly 20 years to complete. A Little Life was published in March 2015, receiving predominantly favorable reviews.
She started her career in New York working in the publicity department of Vintage Books, working for a number of New York publishers. From 1998-2008, she edited The Asian Pacific American Journal, before joining Conde Nast Traveler in 2005. Her “Word of Mouth” section was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2007. She became an editor at Conde Nast before leaving in 2015 to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Yanagihara has edited several books, and served as a New York Foundation for the Arts Literary Fellow in both 2001 and 2008. She currently lives in New York.
What is this book about?
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
